Once India's Grain Basket, now a Basket Case

"You stand on the highway here... and stop the next fifty young men who are travelling on that road. Ask them what do they want to do in life, and they'll all tell you : 'Hamara visa lagwa do' (please get us a visa)," says the village headman in Chhauni, on the outskirts of Hoshiarpur.

Punjab is losing its young men at an alarming rate. After one generation was wiped out by violence, another generation has packed its bags and is queuing up outside the visa offices. Canada is the preferred destination. The US and UK will do too. Thousands have applied to go to Australia and New Zealand as well.

The joke goes, when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps on Moon, he was a happy man. He was after all the first human being to reach Moon. And then he met Banta Singh. A surprised Armstrong asked : "When did you come here, Banta?" Banta, who was a cabbie, calmly replied : "Mai to partition de baad hi aa gaya si (I came here right after Partition)"

Point is, the Sikhs have been always known as enterprising travellers. But now they have been afflicted by a serious travel bug. As you go from cities to towns to mofussils to villages, one can witness this desire to move, to get out of India.

In the Doaba region, in Ludhiana, in Jalandhar, in Hoshiarpur, in town after town after town in Punjab, people are spending small fortunes to get out India. They want to leave India any which way they can. Travel agencies have mushroomed like a cottage industry in these towns, and there are numerous instances of gullible immigrants taken for a ride by fly-by-night operators.

In Punjab villages, most afternoons you see the strange sight of young men and women practising singing and dancing in open fields. They are members of the local bhangra (popular dance form) club, whose sole objective of existence is to garner an invite to perform in a foreign land.

There have been several instances of Bhangra clubs travelling to some cultural festival in Canada and England, and then some members of the troupe never come back. As the Punjab police investigate what is believed to be a rather elaborate network which is involved in human trafficking, many such Bhangra clubs are being investigated too.

Then few years ago there was the case of Jassi, a rather enterprising Sikh lady based in England, who would come to Punjab every few months and get married to a Sikh boy who was keen to settle outside. By the time she was caught, she had duped fourteen such men. A journalist friend who was covering the story later told me, most of the fourteen husbands were more concerned about their missed opportunity to live in England, than having their hearts broken by their much married spouse.

Ten years after the Malta boat tragedy, when a boat carrying hundreds of South Asian immigrants (almost half of them young men from Punjab) sank off the coast of Malta, peeple are still willing to risk life and limb to get out of the state. What worries you are the reasons why these people are so desperate to leave.

No big industry is coming up in the state. Unemployment rate is alarmingly high. School dropouts have gone up over the years. And what is not good news for the society at large is that a large number of the youth is on drugs.

From drugs sold across the counter to the more serious stuff perocured illegally, drug consumption is rather high in Punjab. "For some, availability of easy money (through foreign remittances from family members) is diriving them to drugs. Others are battling with stagnation and reaching out for drugs," explains a health worker in a de-addiction centre in Chandigarh.

The drug problem in Punjab is so serious that a few years ago the state juidiciary ordered that all heroin and other drugs confiscated by the Punjab police and kept in police warehouses as evidence should, in fact, be burnt. It is believed that the court feared some of the drugs stored in police warehouses were being sold in the open market.

"No one wants to stay here and farm and till his land," laments my farmer-turned-journalist friend. The brutal truth in the home of Green Revolution is that agriculture is not the most sought-after means of earning livelihood. Though many farmers benefitted financially from the Green Revolution, the prosperity affected the next generation in a different way.

The rich children of the hardworking farmers who ushered in a revolution in agriculture don't want to break their back, tilling the land. You can see the Green Revolution's Gen Next, dressed in Levi's and Reeboks and driving SUVs. It is evident they find agriculture unsexy. So, hired labour has moved into the state in lakhs over the past couple of decades to work in the fields.

The disease profile in this state has changed. Punjab now has diseases which were not there in the state even thirty years ago, says a senior doctor in Chandigarh. The exodus from the state has been matched by the influx of agricultural labour into the state from Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa. These people have brought with them diseases that were not heard of in Punjab earlier.

"Quality of life here (in Punjab) has declined over the years," explains my friend Khushwant, over drinks in the evening. "Though less than what it should be, money is still coming from agriculture, and the high volume of remittances from the state's large NRI population presents a picture of affluence. Truth is, the situation is rather dismal," he adds.

I ask him to elaborate. "Punjab has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country," he goes on. Over the past couple of decades, industrial development in the state never kept pace with agriculture. And now with agriculture in the decline, and the industry in doldrums, things are not looking good.

As successive state governments, both Congress and Akali, have played footsie with the masses, you can see why the state once known as India's grain basket has slowly and sadly been transformed into a basket case.